Saturday, 27 September 2014

Building self-confidence in a hostile environment

I am always amazed at
people's willingness to believe nonsense. This willingness seems
almost infinite, virtually universal, and does not know any limits or
restrictions. How is it possible that millions of individuals endorse
ideas that are manifestly false? Who is forcing them to adopt strategies that are obviously doomed to fail? This is not a
rhetorical question, but a major practical issue. You have to realize
that those who support false ideas are not only contributing to their
own demise, but also causing trouble for other men and women.

When people find
themselves in deep trouble, it is usually because they have made some
large mistake in the past, a mistake that needs to be recognized and
remedied. Of course, when someone finds himself enmeshed in deep
problems, it is not the right moment to engage theoretical
discussions and make unproven recommendations.

Before problems become overwhelming

Yet, if you wait until
your problems become overwhelming, you run the risk of getting
severely hurt, financially, physically, and psychologically.
Unfortunately, people will all too often begin to address their
concerns only after those have reached a critical level, and have
become almost unmanageable.

It never ceases to
astonish me that so many individuals are ignorant of the basic
principles of self-protection, and instead, they prefer to adhere to
invalid ideas that are convenient in the short term, but disastrous
for the future.

It goes without saying
that self-inflicted blindness never delivers good results. Waiting
for catastrophes to happen, and then trying to reverse them is a
horrible way to live. In contrast, wise men learned long ago that
disasters should rather be avoided, dangers averted, and crises
prevented.

If you ever find yourself
in a critical situation, you have to employ your resources to
overcome immediate threats, and at the same time, make sure that you
draw the right conclusions from the story, and learn to protect
yourself in the years to come.

A hugely underrated discipline

Self-protection
is a hugely underrated discipline. When people speak about
self-protection, they usually mean a set of skills for close physical
combat, or the practice of martial arts such as judo or karate. Those
are very narrow conceptions of self-defence, conceptions that render
the term almost useless. If you limit the concept of self-defence to
learning to fight in the street, you turn the whole idea into
something ridiculously dangerous.

Besides, even if
self-defence is crucially important to get you out of dire
situations, it plays even a more critical role in helping you avoid
those situations in the first place. When it comes to self-defence,
the kind of expert that is worth listening to is precisely the one
who never engages in physical combat because he systematically
succeeds in avoiding aggressiveness.

You definitely don't want
to learn self-defence from someone who spends his weekends
quarrelling with drunkards, fighting juvenile gangs, or engaging in
other kinds of irresponsible behaviour. Aggressive people should not
be your role models for learning how to protect yourself.

The role model you need

Instead, you should be
learning self-protection and conflict prevention from people who know
how to stay out of trouble. The principles you can learn from those
experts are going to help you stay safe, and overcome whatever
problems you might be facing.

Conversely, the kind of
expert that teaches you to kick your opponent between his legs is
making you believe that it's a good idea to engage in physical combat
with aggressive people. My contention is that such an approach to
self-defence is not only impractical today, but suicidal in the long
term.

Wise
individuals do not conceive self-defence as a set of techniques for
fighting at close range, but as the science of staying unharmed, no
matter what. From this perspective, the best fighters are the ones
who discourage enemies from attacking, and systematically steer out
of trouble.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOHN VESPASIAN is the author of eight books about rational living, including "When Everything Fails, Try This" (2009), "Rationality Is the Way to Happiness" (2009), "The Philosophy of Builders: How to Build a Great Future with the Pieces from Your Past" (2010), "The 10 Principles of Rational Living" (2012), "Rational Living, Rational Working: How to Make Winning Moves When Things Are Falling Apart" (2013), "Consistency: The Key to Permanent Stress Relief" (2014), "On Becoming Unbreakable: How Normal People Become Extraordinarily Self-Confident" (2015), and "Thriving in difficult times: Twelve lessons from Ancient Greece to improve your life today" (2016).